My younger brother Ron and I were very big for our age. When people told Pop, "You have really good looking boys," Pop would smile and agree: "Yep, they're strong as an ox and nearly as smart."

Sunday, September 21, 2008

San Francisco Chronicle Lies and Half-Truths Outed

(Click on photo to enlarge)

Each week up to the election the San Francisco Chronicle is publishing a compilation of lies, half-truths, and contradictions. As to be expected, the Chronicle column is heavily slanted towards exposing John McCain, and in the process the Chronicle perpetrates more lies and half-truths than they expose.

As an example, even when exposing Obama (September 20, 2008) for linking Senator McCain with Rush Limbaugh in a Spanish language TV and radio ad, and correctly pointing out that Limbaugh has been very critical of McCain, the Chronicle overlooked the biggest lies and distortions of Obama’s ad. The Obama ad uses a Limbaugh quote in which the commentator calls Mexicans "stupid and unqualified" and another where he tells immigrants "Shut your mouth or get out." But as many news organizations have reported, the quotes came in the context of discussions of NAFTA and Mexican laws and were not directed at Mexican immigrants to the U.S. In fact, the "Shut your mouth or get out" quote was part of an illustration by Limbaugh of Mexico’s extremely strict immigration laws, not United States immigration policy.

The Chronicle criticized a McCain ad statement: “The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail." According to the Chronicle, “McCain said that he wouldn't vote for his own immigration bill.” Interestingly, the Chronicle never mentioned that the reason McCain and Republicans wouldn’t vote for the bill was because of the “poison pill” amendments inserted by Democrats that were, in fact, mentioned in many press reports. Also not mentioned by the Chronicle, Senate majority leader Harry Reid killed the bill when he yanked it off the Senate floor.

So far The Chronicle has contributed more than their share of the “half-truths and distortions.”

It will be interesting to see how the Chronicle handles the statements Obama made in Florida: “If my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week…Millions of families would've been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves.”

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Republican proposed Social Security reforms would know that nothing would change for current retirees, participation would be voluntary, and the maximum privatized contribution would be less than a third of total contributions, and could only be made to a diversified portfolio of stocks and/or bonds.